Through his research and teaching, Ben Doleac has explored sound, signification, and subversion in popular music and the music of the African diaspora, from funk and jazz to disco, hip hop and beyond. His current research examines the New Orleans brass band parade known as the second line, detailing how black New Orleanians have utilized the parade as a site of both creative resistance and direct political action from the Jim Crow era through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In 2014, Doleac won a Graduate Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where he researched the early history of jazz. His writing has been published in Ethnomusicology Review and The Yearbook of Traditional Music. He has also been a performing vocalist for more than two decades in ensembles ranging from Harvard’s Kumbaa Singers to the UCLA Early Music Ensemble.

Music and culture of the African diaspora; interrelationship between music and dance; popular music; American history; postcolonial theory; urban studies.

PhD in Ethnomusicology, UCLA, 2018; M.A. in Music (Ethnomusicology), the University of Alberta, 2011; B.A. in English, Wesleyan University, 2005